


Circlet

by revolutionator



Category: We Know the Devil (Visual Novel)
Genre: Mild Sexual Content, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-16 01:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12332613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revolutionator/pseuds/revolutionator
Summary: Spite motivates us all to do weird things calm down Jupiter





	Circlet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jaggedwolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaggedwolf/gifts).



> Thank you so much for letting me have the chance to write this! I enjoyed it so much.

 

Out in the woods it was dark and fragrant and unfamiliar, even the parts she once walked a million times when toting spare parts between the cabins. There was a time when they all would have remembered the route to the cabin with the ease of following markers on a videogame map. Now it was harder. Landmarks had nestled into downy beds of moss, digested themselves down into a chaos of split ends and broken hinges. The path was grown over. Jupiter bit her lip and reached for her own wrist with half-remembered urgency.

 

'Idiot,' came the voice to her left. 'That's the way that leads back to the lake.' And Neptune squeezed Jupiter's wrist for her, which was better than the snap of elastic. Her hand was gone before Jupiter could squeeze back. Typical.

 

'Where is it then? I can barely remember what I said ten minutes ago, give me a break...'

 

'It's right ahead,' came the third voice, behind her right shoulder. Softer and more timid than Neptune's, not scared but cautious.

 

Venus bobbed into view, her head resplendent in its crown of milky dandelion fluff. She stooped out of sight. When she stood up again, a whole section of the forest wall moved with her – Jupiter could see now that there was a huge, rotted wooden screen behind the moss and foliage, and with that out of the way the trail picked up again.

 

Neptune started to clap, then thought better of it, digging in her pocket for her phone and cursing when it took longer than two seconds to load what she keyed in.

 

'Fuck it,' she said, right as the online video loaded, and blared the passage opening jingle from Ocarina of Time. The other two glanced at her with bemused fondness, but she didn't give them the space to react further; she was already marching along the blurred path, phone jammed back into her skirt pocket.

 

'Reception always did suck here,' Jupiter said.

 

'Fuck this place,' Neptune said. It wasn't exactly a reply.

 

'Fuck, fuck, fuck,' Venus said softly behind her, timing each one with her steps forward. She had a wan smile on her face, like she was enjoying her own courage to curse. 'I wish we had our radios, at least. Just for old time's sake.'

 

'I've got mine,' Jupiter said, regretting it as soon as she said it – Neptune whirled around to look at her in angry, impassioned askance – 'but it doesn't work anymore.'

 

They carried on walking in silence. Jupiter put her hand in the pocket of her jeans. It was the same hand that used to wear the hair tie, but she hadn't noticed that when she'd stored her radio there. Just a little coincidence. Fingering the sharp, ragged plastic seam along the edge of the radio helped some, even when she wasn't quite sure what it was helping her with.

 

When she next raised her head, she could see the outline of the cabin against the sky. The moon hung huge and gibbous in its wake, tracing out the edges of the cabin, proudly showcasing every facet of its disrepair. Neptune stood on the porch, so careful to avoid the rotting boards that her legs stood in a dramatic arc, and Jupiter felt her stomach leap up to sit in her throat. Oh, it was still so close. All these seconds and minutes and weeks and years coalesced into this moment, and right now it was like walking up to the cabin for the first time, before they'd understood anything.

 

Venus took her free hand.

 

'It was your idea,' she said in her gentle, kind voice. She faltered when Jupiter didn't reply right away, offered a squeaky 'sorry' as consolation, and hurried after Neptune. Jupiter smiled after her, thinking: _all this time and she still can't turn it off. Me too, though._

 

The three of them gathered in the central living space of the cabin.

 

'It's so gross up here,' Neptune said with a pretty sneer. 'Think the stairwell rotted through. You still want to go up to the room with the radio?'

 

'Ground floor is fine.'

 

'Fight me for once, Jupiter.'

 

'Mm.'

 

'Say it. Say, 'fuck off, we're doing this properly and clambering up that wall like woodlice'.'

 

'You just want her to fight you so you can be the bad guy,' Venus said. 'Tough. You can't just have it for yourself anymore. Greedy.'

 

Neptune said nothing, but walked closer to the door that Venus was leaning against and lit up a cigarette. She took a deep breath of it, a fluid breath, and exhaled with all the systematic grace of a water fountain. Jupiter's wrist itched. She watched Venus' eyes glance at the cigarette, then slide away, like she felt too guilty to keep watching.

 

Jupiter didn't have a hairtie with her, so she just rubbed the skin there instead.

 

'Alright,' she said suddenly, 'I changed my mind. There's enough floor up there to sit, lie down, whatever, so let's do it. All of us. Come on.'

 

Neptune took a deep gulp of smoke. Her head bobbed easily to the side, a pretty bird checking for bread in the water. She considered Jupiter's proposal. She breathed out slowly. Jupiter watched her mouth curl around the expulsion of smoke. She tried to ignore the gnawing feeling in her stomach, the desire to just reach out...

 

But it was okay to reach out.

 

She crossed the room and held Neptune's hands with hers. She was too nervous to read the expression on Neptune's face. She kissed her, let Neptune's smoke whorl around her own face and settle in her hair. It tasted like a smile. She half-expected to cough, but of course, did not.

 

'Come _on_ ,' she repeated. She turned to look at Venus. 'Do I need to kiss you too?'

 

'She'd love that.'

 

'I – Listen -'

 

Jupiter reached out with her strong, clean hands and closed them around Venus' arms. Venus didn't pull away, even with the protest bubbling up out of her mouth, inevitable as coughing up catarrh. Mucus ruined everything that way. Jupiter wouldn't let it. She kissed Venus hard, harder even than she had kissed Neptune, because she knew Venus had a tendency to take softness the wrong way – to mistake it for doubt or confusion or reluctance. Jupiter wouldn't let her.

 

'Upstairs,' she said. She felt braver now.

 

Neptune pushed herself away from the wall. The cigarette dropped, but rather than rolling underfoot it fell out of existence, unravelling and uncoupling into nothing before it could hit the floor. Venus stayed standing close, where Jupiter could hear the soft wheeze of her breathing.

 

They chose to climb. It just felt more appropriate. They could have just winked out, reunited at the top of where the dilapidated staircase used to sit, and that would have been the end of it. But being back here in old bodies and old forms made it feel worth it; it was hard for Jupiter to put into words, but she was delighted by the weight of her own body against the wall, the lurch in her belly when she missed a foothold, the delight when by some unknown grace (her own?) she recovered.

 

Neptune was good at climbing. She was sitting on the precipice long before Jupiter clawed her way up. Jupiter remembered her at camp that way too – always one step ahead of the competition, but you never got to see the effort she spent to get there. The two of them had to bend over to help Venus up the rest of the way. Poor Venus.

 

The three of them sat at the edge where the upper-storey floor gave out. The radio still sat in the corner, but it was scorched and skeletal now, burned from the inside out. A ring of salt lay in a tight circle around it.

 

'Fuck,' Neptune said with dispassion. 'They don't use this place at all anymore, huh? Was that because of us?'

 

'Partly,' Venus said. 'This cabin was already abandoned when we were here, remember.'

 

'Evil vanquishes good,' Neptune said. 'They sent us to drive it out and instead we drove them out.'

 

'They moved upstate,' Venus said morosely. 'We just forced them into a different place. They're still running the camps. Still giving out radios. Still fighting the devil.'

 

'Cockroaches,' Neptune said, but she didn't actually say it, she spat it. She spat it so hard Jupiter could hardly understand the word.

 

Venus put her arms around both of them.

 

'Do you still...'

 

'Yeah,' Jupiter interrupted, 'yeah, yeah, I do, I know I just said it like it was a joke but I do really want to do it. I just. You have to give me a minute.'

 

'It's okay.'

 

'You have to give me a minute because it's so weird to have, like, human fingernails and eyelashes that don't set alight and also to be just me, and not us-'

 

'Jupiter, we _know.'_

 

'-but also because I'm so sad,' Jupiter said. It came out like a nasty gasp, almost like a cough, but none of them coughed anymore. 'I want to do it, but being here just makes it so real, because it was real, and it keeps being real. Even if we make fun of it or desecrate it or whatever! And I hate that.'

 

'I wouldn't call it 'desecrating',' Venus started to say, but Neptune was too fast.

 

'That's what's good about it, though. It's real, and we're _more_ real. And we won here. And we'll keep winning.' Her voice was fierce. There was no trace of the vague despondence she'd had just a few moments ago. 'We're here because it was real.'

 

Neptune reached for Venus' shirt. It was a different button-up shirt from her first time at camp. Faded, filmy material. Unbuttoned over a cotton tank top. 'STILL THE BEST 1973' was emblazoned over her chest in Impact font. She pushed it all up over Venus' fluffy dandelion head in one aggressive shove, toppling her in the process. Venus fell back against the floor and Neptune fell with her, descending on top of her in a cascade of skirts, of gray mesh and black silk. Her hands went to Venus' bare chest.

 

Venus raised her own shaking hands and pushed Neptune's skirt up, exposing the dappled skin of her thigh. Jupiter watched as Neptune sank down on her, pressing her lips roughly into the soft skin at Venus' throat. Peck, peck, peck. Venus clamped her lips and eyelids closed. Her cheeks were very pink.

 

'Come here,' Neptune said. Her voice held steady. She was looking Venus right in the eyes, even as she addressed Jupiter – Venus twitched and didn't look away. They all knew how she longed to dart her eyes to some place else, skitter them out of Neptune's arresting hold. But she was better now. They were all better.

 

Jupiter was better too.

 

She knelt down on the floor beside them and stroked one hand over the plume of Neptune's hair. She broke the stare for Venus, and with the hand that had once worn a hair tie she traced Neptune's sneering lips. Neptune bit her finger. Jupiter pushed her mouth open. Neptune's throat spasmed like she was going to vomit. Jupiter held her there until that urge subsided, and then kissed her again.

 

Venus gasped on the floor, then grasped, then gripped. Then felt. Jupiter felt. Neptune, despite her best efforts to pretend otherwise, felt too. The feeling was between them like a trophy. Now and then one of them would cast a glance over to the salted radio, and if the one of them was Neptune, they would flip it off with an immaculately manicured finger.

 

A glimpse of breath, a glimpse of touch. Their bodies fitting together, not impossibly well, but imperfectly, with problems and clumsiness and residual mess.

 

When it was over Jupiter cried, though she insisted she was happy. Neptune smoked. Venus paused for a moment when offered the cigarette, but accepted it and smoked as well. Jupiter took the cigarette when she was done.

 

'Feel better,' Neptune said. It wasn't exactly a question.

 

'Yeah, yeah, I think so.'

 

'Me too,' said Venus. 'It was petty but maybe _I'm_ petty.'

 

'Was it petty?' Jupiter smiled like she was quite delighted by the concept, even with fat tears still budding and rolling down her face like rain on a window.

 

'Yes,' Neptune and Venus said, together but not as one. All three of them looked at each other and began to laugh.

 

'This was nostalgic,' Neptune said.

 

She wound her arm tight around Venus, who was having difficulty getting her eyes back under control. Jupiter's weeping was infectious, but when Venus wept a million tiny pupilled irises wept anew in the trail of her tears, opening and closing with wild curiosity, and when she lifted her hands to wipe her face dry they simply transferred to her palms and knuckles and forearms.

 

Neptune's arm, too, had become something much more than itself – a binding rope of tar, fluid and slick and unctuous, growing its own eyes as though afraid Venus might be lonely. When Neptune smiled at Jupiter the spaces between her teeth were sharp and black and oily.

 

Jupiter didn't need to look at her own body. New fingertips reaching. Branching. A fork splitting the delicate flesh of her inner elbow, then again into a crossroads, a multitude of crossroads until she had fractalled into an infinity of reaching hands that reached for Venus and Neptune and rejoiced when they didn't back away. Light and water. Her whole body sang with them.

 

'Fuck this place,' Venus chirped happily. Her lips were a crystal beak, encrusted in layers of diamond eyes, and her hair was sun and cornflower, and she was beautiful.

 

'Fuck in this place,' Neptune corrected. Her arms held the other two fast like bonding glue or wet soil. Her hair was a waterfall. Her eyes were rimmed in dark liquid crust and her skin ran to tallow where it touched the floor. Her grin shone, a slice of moonlight on an open sea. 'Like we just did.'

 

'I love you so much,' Jupiter said. 'Let's do this again in like, twenty years.'

 

Her hands closed around them, around the world, around herself, and hugged tight enough and long enough to suffocate their surroundings, and then the shack lay abandoned again, like she had never touched anything or anyone, like she had never existed at all.

 


End file.
